Will USB serial ever be fixed?

Paul Marciano pm940 at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 9 10:09:45 PDT 2005


I have a general question on the status of USB to
serial support in FreeBSD (specifically the ucom and
ftdi drivers).

I need an extra serial port on my system and for
reasons outside the scope of this email I can't just
plug in a PCI card.  I'm trying to use USB, but it
seems that ucom is broken and no one is fixing it.

A tcflush() bug posted last year reports that USB
serial ports hang on a call to tcflush().  This can be
observed by using getty on one.

Another poster reported problems running PPP
(including a kernel crash).


Given the lack of movement in these bugs, it looks
like the FreeBSD developers don't care about ucom...
certainly not enough to fix it.

Now I could get up on a soapbox and say how
unacceptable it is for a fundamental peripheral like
serial ports (even though they're over USB) to be so
obviously broken for so long... but I won't, because
I'm not a developer and I understand that it's a
volunteer thing and overall FreeBSD is otherwise
excellent.


So without wanting to offend (whilst secretly being
pretty frustrated with the corner I find myself in) I
would like to know, hopefully from someone responsible
for the subsystem, if ucom/ftdi is likely to be fixed
in the next six months.


Sigh.  I really don't want to have to move to Linux
for something this small, but USB serial is a system
component I can't change.


Be honest.  Be brutal.  I need to know where FreeBSD
stands on this.

Thanks,
Paul.



	
		
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